In 2013, Nicholas Dawidoff sat in the draft room of the New York Jets. As the author of “Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football,” Dawidoff was given an all-access look inside the room filled with binders of notes and multi-colored draft boards that lined the walls.

Years of studying and evaluation led to a three-day period where high ranking team employees, like then head coach Rex Ryan, were making selections like their livelihoods depended on it — because they did. 

But in 2021, he found himself somewhere different, the Hamden Little League draft room, trading in the notepad to coach his son’s baseball team. 

Dawidoff has seen coaches and scouts decipher every college football player across America. Now, he was the one making the selections, but he wasn’t doing it based on how fast they ran the 40-yard dash. 

In the room were three other coaches who assembled four teams in a much less stressful environment than the one Dawidoff found in the Meadowlands. 

The New Haven native was selecting kids to teams based on what their favorite color was or who they were friends with.

“I remember my first little league draft as being really fun, because you got to know the people you were drafting with,” Dawidoff said. “Everybody had a different style of conversation throughout, and you felt closer to the kids because everybody was talking about the kids in some way that seemed revealing to them.” 

But that simple act of fun, of kids of all skill levels getting together to play baseball, is fading. 

It’s fading across all sports in every town in America — even right here in Hamden. 

Smiles replaced by tears, participation trophies replaced by bills, fun replaced by pressure. 

Local youth sports are dying. 

The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) is an amateur multi-sport nonprofit organization  dedicated exclusively to the development and promotion of amateur sports. 

This isn’t the AAU that many people know. Think Kleenex, it’s become a universal term for all youth travel or club sports. Roughly 27.5% of all children participate in a travel sport of some kind. This form of AAU also certainly is not a nonprofit organization, in fact it has become a multi-billion dollar industry with families traveling all across the country to participate. 

The crux of the rapid rise of AAU? College scholarships. 

“A lot of people are chasing this hope of college scholarships when in reality, they're really, really, really difficult to get to,” Dyer said. “Not only do you have to be good, you have to have good measurements, academics, and fit socially. There's so many things.” 

A study done by TD Ameritrade found that one in five parents believe that participating in AAU will lead to a college scholarship. The reality? Only one in 10 youth athletes will receive a college scholarship of any kind. 

So these parents hit the road — checkbooks in hand — in the hopes that their children will chase this seemingly impossible dream. Baseball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, you name it and families are traveling and playing numerous times a week, often times year round. 

Mike Grove, a Hamden resident, has experienced first-hand the positives and negatives of AAU in his own household. His daughter played softball at the AAU level — and the price tag wasn’t cheap. 

“I see it more in baseball than other sports,” Grove said. “My daughter played softball … it’s like $2,000 for a season.” 

Even with the hefty price tag, almost 20% of U.S. families spend at least $12,000 on travel sports, according to the TD Ameritrade study. 

So why are parents willing to spend nearly the price of a mortgage on their child to play on an AAU team? 

There is no other choice. 

“If you can't go, then the kids don't play,” Grove said. “When they don't play, they don't get the opportunity to be seen.” 

It’s not just softball that is expensive. It’s every sport, across every age group. 

“It is becoming too expensive,” said Lawrence Spivey, owner of CT Wolves, a Hamden-based AAU basketball program. “These teams are charging thousands of dollars, and you still have to pay for travel, then you still have to pay to get in the gym, you have to buy merchandise. The expenses are getting out of hand.”

But many within AAU have backed themselves into a corner, especially in the sport of basketball because it has become almost a necessity to participate in AAU. If you don’t, it’s almost a certainty you won’t be recruited. So, many families are left with a choice: Pay or get left behind. 

“More kids get recruited from AAU than they do high school basketball or anything else,” Spivey said. “You have to play on the circuit. You have to play in certain tournaments. They're not coming to these local tournaments.” 

Spivey isn’t lying either, as 500 out of the 590 active NBA players as of 2023 participated in AAU of some kind. It’s the path that has been laid out in front of every family across the country. If you want to make it big, you have to spend big. But not everyone is going to become Jayson Tatum.

“AAU, I believe, has become watered down when it's really supposed to be a showcase,” Spivey said. “You're supposed to travel to these tournaments, they're supposed to play in front of college coaches and sponsors and stuff. But now it's very watered down. There's 1000 teams, and everybody's dad is a coach and it’s a money grab. It’s not even about the kids anymore.” 

Andre Fischer has seen this first hand. As a coach across multiple AAU programs in the last four years, and now a coach at Capital Prep in Bridgeport, he’s seen the game change, he’s seen the “purity” of the game taken away.  

“I started seeing things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way,” Fischer said. “AAU is a business, and it's more of, ‘What can you do for me right now?” 

Fischer became less like a coach, and more of a vessel to be moved at the parents will. After all, they were paying the bills. 

“We don't have any say,” Fischer said. “So the parents say, ‘If I pay $900 for my son to play in this program, my son has to play. He doesn't have to come to practice, but he better play in the games on Saturday.’” 

In many ways the parents are the pressure. When they spend thousands of dollars each year in the hopes of their child making it big — they need to see return on investment. You never know when that hypothetical scout could be lurking around the corner. 

“If your AAU program is not doing well, not winning, parents leave, and then the coaches that are getting paid, they don't have jobs,” Grove said. “There's a lot more pressure in that organization to produce better players.” 

From the bleachers, Grove is seeing parents get more and more involved in the play on the field — even at the recreational level. 

“You get some parents overly involved, they're yelling through the stands,” Grove said. “It's happening more in the last five or six years. Not even so much at the refs, but at their sons or daughters.” 

Grove tries to not take that approach. He believes there is a time and place to give a kid a push or just sit back and watch them have fun playing a sport. 

“If they love the game, push him, but if they don't love the game, go there and just be supportive,” Grove said.  

Fischer experiences parental-issues firsthand from the sidelines, but there is only so much he can control — after all they are the ones signing the checks. 

“I don't like talking to parents,” Fischer said. “I try to stay away from it, because parents want to coach from the sideline. I had a dad who would sit in the crowd and if I'm telling the player to run a play, he'll tell his son to not run what I asked him to run.” 

This style of producing has marked a fundamental shift in the way the game is played. These players and parents on the AAU circuit need to be seen and they need to produce. It’s leading to a more player-focused style of play. 

“I think AAU is all about selfish basketball,” Fischer said. “If they do get to the next level, their game is going to be stagnant. It's taking away the purity of the game. Kids are not playing defense. You're taking bad shots, you're not passing the ball, you're playing for self.” 

Even with the evolution of the game, Spivey still believes the positives outway the negatives with AAU, when done the right way. 

“You see where you measure up against your competition,” Spivey said. “If you're a dog, that's going to be the motivation that you need to push you over the edge. And if you're just not built for the competition, which a lot of people aren't, it lets you know.” 

AAU isn’t the cash cow it’s portrayed to be for everyone, especially the smaller programs like CT Wolves. Oftentimes, many parents aren’t able to fulfill the payments. 

“I don’t think I’m in the green yet,” Spivey said. “I lose money every year. I sponsor a lot of kids. I rarely collect full payments from parents. I understand, I get it. I don’t make money off CT Wolves.” 

The amount of low income families in youth sports in general is dropping, with only three out of ten participating, according to the Aspen’s Institute’s Project Play.  

With more and more kids leaving the traditional town sport setting for more competitive situations, it’s leaving an increasingly growing amount of kids behind too. 

But Fischer still believes there is a path for those kids — or at least he wants to, for the sake of the game he loves. 

“The one thing I always preach is a mission for free tuition, and you play and go to high school, you get good grades, you can go to college for free,” Fischer said. “Playing AAU [doesn’t]guarantee you that, because [when you play] on a team with 15 other talented kids, someone is gonna get left out.”

Dawidoff, a contributor for The New Yorker, has taken an interest in the effects that the decline of local sports has on children. For him, playing Little League baseball was an integral part of his life. 

“I thought it was an incredibly valuable experience, not just as a baseball player, but also in a civic way,” Dawidoff said. “I got to know such a variety of people, and it was just striking to me the incredible variety of ways that kids were growing up and who they were.” 

Growing up in New Haven in the 1980s, Dawidoff played baseball at every level, from tee-ball all the way to college at the University of New Haven. But it wasn’t the games themselves or the plays he made that he remembers, it’s the people he met. 

Dawidoff came across countless people from different ways of life, whether they were rich, poor, future major leaguers or kids who couldn’t get the bat off their shoulder, the Little League fields of New Haven were littered with a diverse community. 

“I remember how people dressed in their uniforms to make one kid different from the next,” Dawidoff said. “I remember kids who would show up and say surprising things or do surprising things. I remember expressions of society that were both interesting and sometimes inspiring and sometimes also troubling.” 

From kids who would wear one pant leg higher than the other or wear different colored socks, according to Dawidoff, Little League was a microcosm of life. You get to meet so many different people from different backgrounds. 

“There was a lot more than baseball that people were talking about,” Dawidoff said.

AAU doesn’t provide that, he says.

“You’re only playing with people who could afford it,” Dawidoff said. “You’re only playing with people who are really into it, really committed. I think it's a really good thing for people who are talented, to see people who are just starting out at something, people who are learning to do something.” 

And in a place like Hamden, which is incredibly diverse, Dawidoff believes AAU is robbing kids of the opportunity to interact with different, unique people. 

“As American communities go, (Hamden) is incredibly diverse and it just seems to me many different kinds of people live in Hamden, and that means that you have the opportunity, with a Little League, to know many different kinds of people who have many, many different experiences.” 

If you played Little League, you know that it is filled with kids from different levels of skills. One kid might be able to hit a homerun, while the other might not be able to even make contact. Whichever kid you were, it was a valuable experience, filled with life lessons. 

“If baseball isn't difficult for you, it's a really good object lesson in life to watch somebody who finds baseball difficult, to see them struggling with it and slowly improving,” Dawidoff said. “I always found most inspiring when I was coaching (was) the kids who would really, really try to get better.”

So, why is Little League and other local youth sports slowly dying? Those kids that can hit home runs are leaving to chase that AAU dream, sapping the environment of true passion for the game.

“If you take away the kids who are the most enthusiastic about it, those are the kids who are typically most likely to play travel sports,” Dawidoff said. “That level of enthusiasm that's removed not only removes the number of people who can create a league. In other words, it reduces the number of people who are actually participating in a league, but it also reduces the kind of enthusiasm for something.” 

In many ways sports reflect society. Maybe America needs town sports more than ever. In a time where the country is divided, the little moments between two kids on a Little League field are too special to lose. 

“I remember the kid who, when he was a pitcher, would like to make the sign of the cross on the mound before he pitched, and then the batter who made the sign of a cross in response, and say, ‘Now we're all even, let's see who's the better player,’” Dawidoff said.